“My Lizzichen,” he moans, grappling for a grope through sheet and dress, “forgive me, but I’m in need.”
“You rotten scoundrel,” I says, using my elbows against him. “Get you to your own chambers.”
“Come now, mein Liebling, show some mercy.”
“I’ll show you more than mercy, Frederick Engels, now skedaddle. Away with you. Can’t I put my head down a minute?”
He kneels over me and, mocking-like, clasps his hands together as if to beg. “Have pity on a rogue,” he says. “Am I not good to you?” he says. “Is a moment of comfort too much to ask?” he says, and other such phrases that he thinks will wheedle him in.
“Mary Mother, give me patience.” I yank up the linen to stole myself. Knowing neither my own forces nor the degree of his impairment, this sends him rolling—thump!—onto the carpet. I sit up and hold my breath. Rain is falling outside and there’s a barking of animals off and yonder. Bellows of laughter rise up from under the bed. I fall back and sigh.
Boys kept like monks by their mothers go one of two ways: they turn womanly or they turn wild. Frederick’s rearing among the Calvins—kept behind curtains drawn tight and doors too thick for the world’s vices to get in—has done naught for him but disease his head with what it’s been deprived of, and now look at him: single-minded and seeing no ends that aren’t low. He keeps pictures. He makes foreign requests. It’s not always the Council he runs off to.
After some scratching about and some fumbling, there’s a striking at lucifers and the lamp flares up. I cover my eyes from the sudden light. “Still in fit shape, I think you’ll agree,” he says. I see, when I’ve come to terms with it, that he has his clothes off and is showing himself. He clasps his hands behind his neck, which makes the skin run up over his bones and the hair jump out from under his arms. He holds this pose as long as the lush in his veins allows it. Now he wobbles and, giggling like a little girl, staggers over to lean on the wall. The lamp shines hard against him.
Growing up, no one sits down and tells you what the man’s bit is going to look like. Knowledge is got from the snatches you catch. The hole in your father’s combinations. The neighbor man washing at the pump. The surge in the gent’s breeches on the bus. The Jew Beloff pissing in the bucket. Frederick’s is like none of those. In its vigors, it points up and a bit to the side. Its cover goes all the way over the bell and bunches at the end like a pastry twist. Before he does anything, he spits on his hand and peels this back. Then you know he’s right and ready.
Personal, I have my limits with it. There’s things I’ll not be brought to do. I’ll maw it: no harm in that if he doesn’t shove too. And I’ll let him turn me over: let go of your vanities and there’s pleasure to be got there. But the hooer’s trick, that’s crossing the pale. What’s the draw of an act so cruddy? And what’s the purpose, anyhows, when the normal carriage road has been clear of courses these past twenty years? “Keep dreaming, General,” is what I says whenever he starts to rub up that way. “Not for love nor lush.”
Tonight, though, he wants the usual, and I don’t quarrel with that. I bring my hands down his back and put them on his arse, his little arse that hasn’t dropped with the years but has stayed upwise and firm. Where it meets the leg is like the underneath of swollen mammies, and when he pushes, its sides dip in to make dishes smooth enough for your morning milk. It turns heads, the round of it under his breeches. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. When it’s late in the parlor and hot with bodies, and when he himself is sticky from all the hosting, he sometimes takes off his coat and turns to throw it somewhere; that’s when they nab their peek.
He puts his arms under my knees and bends my pins over them. I know he’d like them hooked over his shoulders—my ankles clutching his neck, my toes taking hold of his hair so sleek, his whiskers tickling skin that usual only feels the itch of a stocking—but I’m no longer the young thing I once was, and neither is he, though he likes to think his physical senses are as hale today as when he first fetched a lass.
His eyes are open. He doesn’t ever close them doing it. He likes to pin you, pierce you through. I swear with those eyes he’d stare into naught and find something. Even when he’s lushed they stay clear and bright, and seem to let you into his head, though this can only be a fancy, for afterwards there remains the mystery of what he thinks when he gets on top of you, whether it’s dark or light or what.
I begin to feel it, the quiver down in my cunny, but I’ve to conjure it up if I don’t want it to fade, the last lick of oil in a lamp. I help it with my hand like he himself has taught me—a French recipe—and I let out a gasp. Reading this a sign, he comes down bricks on me.
If he says anything now, dear Jesus, I’ll credit it.
There’s never been anyone like him.
It’s rare I sleep the whole night when he stays. I go off easy enough, but am woken early by his kicking. For some reason, I can’t bear to roll over and see him there grunting and happy. There’s others, I’m sure, who lie and watch for the sun to rise up out of him. He’ll not get that from me. I stay with my back turned.
In actual fact I ought be up already, doing the round. The maid doesn’t get here till Sunday and I’ve to look after everything myself. The pulling back of the blinds and curtains. The opening of the shutters. The drawing up of the kitchen fire and the polishing of the range. The checking of the boiler. The putting on of the kettle. The cleaning of the boots and the knives. Then the other fires. And the hearth rug. And the grate. Then the rubbing of the furniture. Then the washing of the mantelpiece and ledges. Then the dusting of the ornaments. Then the scattering of the tea leaves and the sweeping of them up. So many things, and for every one a thought. So many thoughts at a time, for so many things, it’s hard to know the ones you ought be hearkening to. By thinking you’re forever running behindhand you make things the master of you.
The worst, though, will be the answering of the door. I can already see it in their faces: “Why her?” The butcher boy, the shop girl, the milkmaid, the grocer, the letter carrier: “Can’t see what makes her stand out.” Every day of every week, somebody, some way: “If she can do it, any old beggar can.”
I’ll try to turn blind from it. I’ll pass them my coins and tell them my orders and make as if I’ve not remarked a thing. But afterwards, I know, I’ll be left with something inside, a prickling feeling like a hair in my collar or a pea in my bodice; a reminder of the fact that, when it comes to my hike to the higher caste, there’s no getting away from the chance of it. Would I know what I know, would I have done what I’ve done, would I be here today, swelling it up, if I’d gone down different alleys, taken up with other souls?
Fortune first spins her wheel in my favor in the summer of forty-two. It’s the summer the wages are cut and the mills are turned out. The summer the coalpits are shut and the boiler plugs are pulled and the workers gather and the riots flare and the soldiers march. And while all this is happening I’m at home, locked into the basement with Mary. Though I don’t know it yet, though it will take me time to understand, my being here, inside away from it all—my sitting it out—will be the chancest thing I ever do.
I want to join in. There’s rebellion enough in my heart to spark a hundred rallies. But Mary has other plans for me.
“If you go out that door,” she says, “you’ll not be getting back in.”
“Well, maybe I won’t want to get back in.”
“You want to be a corner girl, is that it? You want to be a loafer and a beggar till you die? Go out there now and that’s what you’ll be, and that’s what you’ll stay. If anyone from the mill sees you with that crowd, or even a girl who looks like you, you’ll have no